I think you are over-estimating the use of caching in a lot of industries and a lot of companies. Further, a company that aggressively caches static files should also recognize the benefits of caching their most common database queries. Another replier to my comment mentioned his Air Canada point totals. The original post is about American Airlines. Point balances change infrequently. An airline could easily query every active customer (had a point balance change within the past 6 months) every 6 hours and keep all those values in memory, dramatically reducing individual DB queries. Or not, and instead choose to sue a very popular blogger and builder of a tool used by your best customers, pissing everybody off and looking extremely petty and customer-unfriendly in the process.